Summary
Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
George Kurtz, the founder and chief executive of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has said the company is “deeply sorry for impact that we’ve caused to customers” after a flawed software update prompted a global IT outage. Kurtz told NBC’s Today Show in the US that the problem was down to a bug in a single update. “We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue,” he said, adding that CrowdStrike was now “working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online”.
Businesses including banks, airlines, railways, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets have been taken offline after blue screen of death error screens were seen on Windows workstations across the globe. Users on the subreddit for the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported issues in India, the United States and New Zealand.
GP surgeries across England hit by the outage have said the issue “will have a big effect”. GP practices said they are unable to access patient records or book appointments due to the major global IT outage. Surgeries took to social media to report they cannot access the EMIS Web system. It is understood that NHS hospitals are currently unaffected by the outage.
Airports in Germany have also been hit by the outages, causing major delays at the start of school holidays for many regions. Air traffic at Berlin’s BER came to a complete halt in the early morning hours of Friday, according to public broadcaster RBB due to a server breakdown that triggered several emergency systems to kick in.
The dollar rose and stock markets fell in jittery trading today, as the global IT outage unnerved investors. The group that runs the London Stock Exchange suffered an outage that affected user access to some of its products, and Refinitiv was down earlier. By around midday in Europe, the company said its services had been restored.
China’s flag carrier Air China and other major airlines have not been affected by the global tech outage that disrupted operations in multiple industries on Friday due to the use of different systems, according to state media CGTN. Meanwhile, Wizz Air said it has suspended its fees for airport check-in as its online systems are unavailable due to the IT outage.
New York City’s subway system agency, the MTA, said that “some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline due to a worldwide technical outage”. It added that train and bus service is unaffected.
The White House said that it was “looking into” the outage, according to a spokesperson speaking to CNN. “We’re aware of the incident and are looking into the issue and impacts,” the full statement said.
The outage also disrupted the European energy market’s liquidity and affected hedge funds and other traders. Traders were unable to access their computers and contact brokers, although the issues are gradually being resolved.
Customers across the UK have faced issues with trying to pay using their cards, with some shops putting up “cash only” signs on their doors. A spokesman for the supermarket Morrisons said there were some “isolated incidents” with payment systems this morning, which have now been resolved. Waitrose said it was taking contactless payments largely as normal, as well as still processing payments by chip and pin and cash.
Elon Musk claimed in a post on X that he had “deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems”. He did not offer any proof for this claim or specify what it entailed.
Russian officials said that their country’s vital systems had not suffered outages anywhere near as bad as those in the UK, US, and much of the rest of the world. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, Microsoft and other software providers have drawn down their operations in the country.
CrowdStrike saw it share value fall precipitously after disclosing that its software update was the source of the debilitating global outage. At midday, CRWD had dropped by 12%. The company’s update interacted negatively with computers running Microsoft Windows.
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CrowdStrike CEO issues statement
CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, issued a statement on the company’s website late on Friday afternoon, in which he apologized once again for the outage and said that CrowdStrike was working to help restore systems.
“Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike,” Kurtz said. “As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
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